By Christopher Isherwood 5 страница

 

George laughs in an appropriately sardonic manner, since this is what Grant expects of him. But this gallows humor sickens his heart. In all those old crises if the twenties, the thirties, the war--each one of them has left its 44

 

 

traces upon George, like an illness--what was terrible was the fear of annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival. Survival into a Rubble Age, in which it will be quite natural for Mr.

Strunk to gun down Grant and his wife and three children, because Grant has neglected to lay in sufficient stores of food and they are starving and may therefore possibly become dangerous and this is no time for sentiment.

 

"There's Cynthia," Grant says, as they re-enter the dining room. "Want to join her?"

 

"Do we have to?"

 

"I guess so." Grant giggles nervously. "She's seen us."

 

And, indeed, Cynthia Leach is waving to them. She is a handsome young New Yorker, Sarah Lawrence-trained, the daughter of a rich family.

Maybe it was partly to annoy them that she recently married Leach, who teaches history here. But their marriage seems to work quite well. Though Andy is slim and white-skinned, he is no weakling; his dark eyes sparkle sexily and he has the unaggressive litheness of one who takes a great deal of exercise in bed. He is somewhat out of his league socially, but no doubt he enjoys the extra effort required to keep up with Cynthia. They give parties to which everyone comes because the food and drink are lavish, thanks to Cynthia's money, and Andy is popular anyhow, and Cynthia isn't that bad.

Her only trouble is that she thinks of herself as an Eastern aristocrat slumming; she tries to be patrician and is merely patronizing.

 

"Andy stood me up," Cynthia tells them. "Talk to me." Then, as they sit down at her table, she turns to Grant. "Your wife's never going to forgive me."

 

"Oh?" Grant laughs with quite extraordinary violence.

 

"She didn't tell you about it?"

 

"Not a word!"

 

"She didn't?" Cynthia is disappointed. Then she brightens. "Oh, but she must be mad at me! I was telling her how hideously they dress the children here."

 

"But she agreed with you, I'm sure. She's always talking about it."

 

"They're being cheated out of their childhood," Cynthia says, ignoring this, "They're being turned into junior consumers! All those dreadful dainty little crea-tures, wearing lipstick! I was down in Mexico last month. It was like a breath of fresh air. Oh, I can't tell you! Their children are so real. No anxiety. No other-direction. They just bloom."

 

"The only question is--" Grant begins. Obviously be is starting not to agree with Cynthia. For this very reason, he mumbles, he can barely be heard. Cynthia chooses not to hear him.

 

"And then that night we came back across the border! Shall I ever forget it? I said to myself, Either these people are insane or I am. They all seemed to be running, the way they do in the old silent newsreels. And the hostess in the restaurant--it had never struck me before how truly sinister it is to call them that. The way she smiled at us! And those enormous menus, with nothing on them that was really edible. And those weird zombie busboys, bringing nothing but glasses of water and simply refusing to speak to you! I just could not believe my own eyes. Oh, and then we stayed the night at one of these ghastly new motels. I had the feeling that it had only just been brought from someplace else, some factory, and set up exactly one minute before we arrived. It didn't belong anywhere. I mean--after all those marvelous old hotels in Mexico--each one of them is really a place--but this was just utterly unreal--"

 

Again, Grant seems about to attempt some kind of a protest. But this time his mumbling is still lower. Even George can't understand him. George takes a big drink of his coffee, feels the kick of it in his nearly empty stomach, and finds himself suddenly high. "Really, Cynthia, my dear!" he hears himself exclaim. "How can you talk such incredible nonsense?"

 

Grant giggles with astonishment. Cynthia looks surprised but rather pleased. She is the kind of bully who likes being challenged; it soothes the itch of her aggression.

 

"Honestly! Are you out of your mind?" George feels himself racing down the runway, becoming smoothly, exhilaratingly airborne. "My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who's just set foot in New York for the first time! That's exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American motels are unreal! My good girl--you know and I know that our motels are deliberately designed to be unreal, if you must use that idiotic jargon, for the very simple reason that an American motel room isn't a room in an hotel, it's the room, definitively, period. There is only one: The Room. And it's a symbol--an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like--for our way of life. And what's our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you've got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death. The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We've reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that's the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can't ever be truly free. One would think that was obvious. The stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. But the Europeans call us inhuman--or they prefer to say immature, which sounds 46

 

 

ruder--because we've flounced their world of individual differences and r"-

mantic inefficiency and objects-for-the-sake-of-object All that dead old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines.

Naturally, they never give up, they keep trying to subvert us, every moment, with their loathsome cult-propaganda. If they ever succeed, we'll be done for. That's the kind of subversion the Un-American Activities Committee ought to be investigating. The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained--

and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out, 'These people are zombies!'

They've got to make themselves belies that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because, actually, they're a far, far more advanced culture--five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter.

Essentially we're creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That" why we're completely at home with symbols like the American motel room.

Whereas the European has horror of symbols because he's such a groveling little materialist...."

 

Some moments before the end of this wild word-flight, George has seen, as it were from a great altitude, Andy Leach enter the dining room.

Which is in-deed a lucky deliverance, for already George has felt his engines cut out, felt himself losing thrust. So now, with the skill of a veteran pilot, he swoops down to a perfect landing. And the beauty of it is, he appears to stop talking out of mere politeness, because Andy has reached their table.

 

"Did I miss something?" Andy asks, grinning.

 

A performer at the circus has no theater curtain to come down and hide him and thus preserve the magic spell of his act unbroken. Poised high on the trapeze under the blazing arcs, he has flashed and pulsed like a star indeed. But now, grounded, unsparkling, unfollowed by spotlights, yet plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him--they are all watching the clowns--he hurries past the tiers of seats toward the exit. Nobody applauds him any more. Very few spare him a single glance.

 

Together with this anonymity, George feels a fatigue come over him which is not disagreeable. The tide of his vitality is ebbing fast, and he ebbs with it, content. This is a way of resting. All of a sudden he is much, much older. On his way out to the parking lot he walks differently, with less elasticity, moving his arms and his shoulders stiffly. He slows down. Now and then his steps actually shuffle. His head is bowed. His mouth loosens and the muscles of his cheeks sag. His face takes on a dull dreamy placid 47

 

 

look. He hums queerly to himself, with a sound like bees around a hive.

From time to time, as he walks, he emits quite loud, prolonged farts.

 

THE hospital stands tall on a sleepy bypassed hill rising from steep lawns and flowering bushes, within sight of the freeway itself. A tall reminder to the passing motorists--this is the end of the road, folks--it ha" a pleasant aspect, nevertheless. It stands open to all breezes, and there must be many of its windows from which you can see the ocean and the Palos Verde headland and even Catalina Island, in the clear winter weather.

 

The nurses at the reception desk are pleasant, too. They don't fuss you with a lot of questions. If you know the number of the room you want to visit, you don't even have to ask for their permission; you can go right up.

 

George works the elevator himself. At the second floor it is stopped, and a colored male nurse wheels in a prone patient. She is for surgery, he tells George, so they must descend again to the ground floor where the operating rooms are. George offers respectfully to get off the elevator but the young nurse (who has very sexy muscular arms) says, "You don't have to"; so there he stands, like a spectator at the funeral of a stranger, furtively peeking at the patient. She appears to be fully conscious, but it would be a kind of sacrilege to speak to her, for already she is the dedicated, the ritually prepared victim. She seems to know this and consent to it; to be entirely relaxed in her consent. Her gray hair looks so pretty; it must have been recently waved.

 

This is the gate, George says to himself.

 

Must I pass through here, too?

 

Ah, how the poor body recoils with its every nerve from the sight, the smell, the feel of this place! Blindly ii shies, rears, struggles to escape. That it should ever he brought here--stupefied by their drugs, pricked by their needles, cut by their little knives--what an unthinkable outrage to the flesh!

Even if they were to cure and release it, it could never forget, never forgive.

Nothing would be the same any more. It would have lost all faith in itself.

 

Jim used to moan and complain and raise hell over a head cold, a cut finger, a pile. But Jim was lucky at the end--the only time when luck really counts. The truck hit his car just right; he never felt it. And they never got him into a place like this one. His smashed leavings were of no use to them for their rituals.

 

Doris's room is on the top floor. The hallway is deserted, for the moment, and the door stands open, with a screen hiding the bed. George 48

 

 

peeps over the top of the screen before going in. Doris is lying with her face toward the window.

 

George has gotten quite accustomed by now to the way she looks. It isn't even horrible to him any more, because he has lost his sense of a transformation. Doris no longer seems changed. She is a different creature altogether--this yellow shriveled mannequin with its sticks of arms and legs, withered flesh and hollow belly, making angular outlines under the sheet.

What has it to do with that big arrogant animal of a girl? With that body which sprawled stark naked, gaping wide in shameless demand, underneath Jim's naked body? Gross in-sucking vulva, sly ruthless greedy flesh, in all the bloom and gloss and arrogant resilience of youth, demanding that George shall step aside, bow down and yield to the female prerogative, hide his unnatural head in shame. I am Doris. I am Woman. I am Bitch-Mother Nature. The Church and the Law and the State exist to support me. I claim my biological rights. I demand Jim.

 

George has sometimes asked himself, Would I ever, even in those days, have wished this on her?

 

The answer is No. Not because George would be incapable of such fiendishness; but because Doris, then, was infinitely more than Doris, was Woman the Enemy, claiming Jim for herself. No use destroying Doris, or ten thousand Dorises, as long as Woman triumphs. Woman could only be fought by yielding, by letting Jim go away with her on that trip to Mexico. By urging him to satisfy all his curiosity and flattered vanity and lust (vanity, mostly) on the gamble that he would return (as he did) saying, She's disgusting, saying, Never again.

 

And wouldn't you be twice as disgusted, Jim, if you could see her now? Wouldn't you feel a crawling horror to think that maybe, even then, her body you fon-dled and kissed hungrily and entered with your aroused flesh already held seeds of this rottenness? You used to bathe the sores on cats so gently and you never minded the stink of old diseased dogs; yet you had a horror, in spite of yourself, of human sickness and people who were crippled. I know something, Jim. I feel certain of it. You'd refuse absolutely to visit her here. You wouldn't be able to force yourself to do it.

 

George walks around the screen and into the room, making just the necessary amount of noise. Doris turns her head and sees him, seemingly without surprise. Probably, for her, the line between reality and hallucination is getting very thin. Figures keep appearing, disappearing. If one of them sticks you with a needle, then you can be sure it actually is a nurse. George may be George or, again, he may not. For convenience she will treat him as George. Why not? What does it matter either way?

 

"Hello," she says. Her eyes are a wild brilliant blue in her sick yellow face.

 

"Hello, Doris."

 

A good while since, George has stopped bringing her flowers or other gifts. There is nothing of any significance he can bring into this room from the outside now; not even himself. Everything that matters to her is now right here in this room, where she is absorbed in the business of dying. Her preoccupation doesn't seem egotistic, however; it does not exclude George or anyone else who cares to share in it. This preoccupation is with each, and we can all share in that, at any time, at any age, well or ill.

 

George sits down beside her now and takes her hand. If he had done this even two months ago, it would have been loathsomely false. (One of his most bitterly shameful memories is of a time he kissed her cheek--Was it aggression, masochism? Oh, damn all such words!--right after he found out she'd been to bed with Jim. Jim was there when it happened. When George moved toward her to kiss her, Jim's eyes looked startled and scared, as if he feared George was about to bite her like a snake.) But now taking Doris'

hand isn't false, isn't even an act of compassion. It is necessary--he has discovered this on previous visits--in order to establish even partial contact.

And holding her hand he feels less embarrassed by her sickness; for the gesture means, We are on the same road, I shall follow you soon. He is thus excused from having to ask those ghastly sickroom questions, How are you, how's it going, how do you feel?

 

Doris smiles faintly. Is it because she's pleased that he has come?

 

No. She is smiling with amusement, it seems. Speaking low but very distinctly, she says, "I made such a noise, yesterday."

 

George smiles too, waiting for the joke.

 

"Was it yesterday?" This is in the same tone, but addressed to herself.

Her eyes no longer see him; they look bewildered and a bit scared. Time must have become a very odd kind of mirror-maze for her now; and mazes can change at any instant from being funny to being frightening.

 

But now the eyes are aware of him again; the bewilderment has passed. "I was screaming. They heard me clear down the hall. They had to fetch the doctor." Doris smiles. This, apparently, is the joke. "Was it your back?" George asks. The effort to keep sympathy out of his voice makes him speak primly someone who is trying to suppress an ungentlemanly native accent. But Doris disregards the question (is off in some new direction of her own, frowning little. She asks abruptly, "What time is it?"

 

"Nearly three."

 

There is a long silence. George feels a terrible need to say something, anything.

 

"I was out on the pier the other day. I hadn't been there in ages. And, do you know, they've torn down the old roller-skating rink? Isn't that a shame? It s is as if they can't bear to leave anything the way it to be. Do you remember that booth where the woman used to read your character from your handwriting? That's gone too--"

 

He stops short, dismayed.

 

Can memory really get away with such a crude trick? Seemingly it can. For he has picked the pier from casually as you pick a card at random from a magician's deck--and behold, the card has been forced! It was while George and Jim were roller-skating that they first met Doris. (She was with a boy named Norman whom she quickly ditched.) And later they all went to have their handwriting read. And the woman told Jim that he had latent musical talent, and Doris that she had a great capacity for bringing out the best in other people.

 

Does she remember? Of course she must! George glances at her anxiously. She lies staring at the ceiling, frowning harder.

 

"What did you say the time was?"

 

"Nearly three. Four minutes of."

 

"Look outside in the hall, will you? See if anyone's there."

 

He gets up, goes to the door, looks out. But before he has even reached it, she has asked with harsh impatience, "Well?"

 

"There's no one."

 

"Where's that fucking nurse?" It comes out of her so harshly, so nakedly desperate.

 

"Shall I go look for her?"

 

"She knows I get a shot at three. The doctor told kr. She doesn't give a shit."

 

"I'll find her."

 

"That bitch won't come till she's good and ready."

 

"I'm sure I can find her."

 

"No! Stay here."

 

"Okay."

 

"Sit down again."

 

"Sure." He sits down. He knows she wants his hand. le gives it to her.

She grips it with astonishing strength. "George--"

 

"Yes?"

 

"You'll stay here till she comes?"

 

"Of course I will."

 

Her grip tightens. There is no affection in it, no communication. She isn't gripping a fellow creature. His hand is just something to grip. He dare not ask her about the pain. He is afraid of releasing some obscene horror, something visible and tangible and stinking, right here between them in the room.

 

Yet he is curious, too. Last time, the nurse told him that Doris has been seeing a priest. (She was raised a Catholic.) And, sure enough, here on the table beside the bed is a little paper book, gaudy and cute as a Christmas card: The Stations of the Cross... Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when here is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?. Perhaps Doris has learned something already about the journey ahead of her. But, even supposing that she has and that George could bring himself to ask her, she could never tell him what she knows. For that could only be expressed in the language of the place to which she is going. And that language--though some of us gabble it so glibly--has no real meaning in our world. In our mouths, it is just a lot of words.

 

Here's the nurse, smiling, in the doorway. "I'm punctual today, you see!" She has a tray with the hypodermic and the ampoules.

 

"I'll be going," George says, rising at once.

 

"Oh, you don't have to do that," says the nurse "If you'll just step outside for a moment. This won't take any time at all."

 

"I have to go anyway," George says, feeling guilty as one always does about leaving any sickroom. Not that Doris herself makes him feel guilty.

She seems to have lost all interest in him. Her eyes are fixed o "he needle in the nurse's hand.

 

"She's been a bad girl," the nurse says. "We can't get her to eat her lunch, can we?"

 

"Well, so long, Doris. See you again in a couple of days."

 

"Goodbye, George. " Doris doesn't even glance at him, and her tone is utterly indifferent. He is lea... Jig her world and thereby ceasing to exist. He takes her hand and presses it. She doesn't respond. She watches the bright needle as it moves toward her.

 

Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind, to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive.

 

Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing.

 

As George pressed Doris' hand just now, he knew something: that the very last traces of the Doris who tried to take Jim from him have vanished from this shriveled mannequin, and, with them, the last of hate. As long as 52

 

 

one tiny precious drop of hate remained, George could still find something left in her of Jim. For he hated Jim too, nearly as much as her, while they were away together in Mexico. That has been the bond between him and Doris. And now it is broken. And one more bit of Jim is lost to him forever.

 

AS George drives down the boulevard, the big unwieldy Christmas decorations--reindeer and jingle bells slung across the street on cables secured to metal Christmas trees--are swinging in a chill wind. But they are merely advertisements for Christmas, paid for by the local merchants.

Shoppers crowd the stores and the sidewalks, their faces somewhat bewildered, their eyes reflecting, like polished buttons, the cynical sparkle of the Yuletide. Hardly more than a month ago, before Khrushchev agreed to pull his rockets out of Cuba, they were cramming the markets, buying the shelves bare of beans, rice and other foodstuffs, utterly useless, most of them, for air-raid-shelter cookery, because they can't be prepared without pints of water. Well, the shoppers were spared--this time. Do they rejoice?

They are too dull for that, poor dears; they never knew what didn't hit them.

No doubt because of that panic buying, they have less money now for gifts.

But they have enough. It will be quite a good Christmas, the mer-chants predict. Everyone can afford to spend at least something, except, maybe, some of the young hustlers (recognizable at once to experienced eyes like George's) who stand scowling on the street corners or staring into shops with the maximum of peripheral vision.

 

George is very far, right now, from sneering at any of these fellow creatures. They may be crude and mercenary and dull and low, but he is proud, is glad, is almost indecently gleeful to be able to stand up and be counted in their ranks--the ranks of that marvelous minority, The Living.

They don't know their luck, these people on the sidewalk, but George knows his--for a little while at least--because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is to join.

 

I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life- energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body--

even this beat-up carcass--that still has warm blood and semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh! The scowling youths on the corners see him as a dodderer no doubt, or at best as a potential score. Yet he claims a distant kinship with the strength of their young arms and shoulders and loins. For a few bucks he could get any one of them to climb into the car, ride back with him to his house, strip off butch leather jacket, skin-tight Levi's, shirt and 53

 

 

cowboy boots and take a naked, sullen young athlete, in the wrestling bout his pleasure. But George doesn't want the bought unwilling bodies of these boys. He wants to rejoice in his own body--the tough triumphant old body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim and is going outlive Doris.

 

He decides to stop by the gym--although this isn't one of his regular days--on his way home.

 

IN the locker room, George takes off his clothes, gets into his sweat socks, jockstrap and shorts. Shall he put on a tee shirt? He looks at himself in the long mirror. Not too bad. The bulges of flesh over the belt of the shorts are not so noticeable today. The legs are quite good. The chest muscles, when properly flexed, don't sag. And, as long as he doesn't have his spectacles on, he can't see the little wrinkles inside the elbows, above the kneecaps and around the hollow of the sucked-in belly. The neck is loose and scraggy under all circumstances, in all lights, and would look gruesome even if he were half-blind. He has abandoned the neck altogether, like an untenable military position.

 

Yet he looks--and doesn't he know id--better than nearly all of his age-mates at this gym. Not because they're in such bad shape--they are healthy enough specimens. What's wrong with them is their fatalistic acceptance of middle age, their ignoble resignation to grandfatherhood, impending retirement and golf. George is different from them because, in some sense which can't quite be defined but which is immediately apparent when you see him naked, he hasn't given up. He is still a contender, and they aren't.

Maybe it's nothing more mysterious than vanity which gives him this air of a withered boy? Yes, despite his wrinkles, his slipped flesh, his graying hair, his grim-lipped, strutting spryness, you catch occasional glimpses of a ghostly someone else, soft-faced, boyish, pretty. The combination is bizarre, it is older than middle age itself, but it is there.

 

Looking grimly into the mirror, with distaste and humor, George says to himself, You old ass, who are you trying to seduce? And he puts on his tee shirt.

 

In the gym there are only three people. It's still too early for the office workers. A big heavy man named Buck--all that remains at fifty of a football player---is talking to a curly-haired young man named Rick, who aspires to television. Buck is nearly nude; his rolling belly bulges indecently over a kind of bikini, pushing it clear down to the bush line. He seems quite will.-

out shame. Whereas Rick, who has a very well-made muscular body, wears 54

 

 

a gray wool sweatshirt and pan covering all of it from the neck to the wrists and ankles. "Hi, George," they both say, nodding casually at him and this, George feels, is the most genuinely friend.. greeting he has received all day.

 

Buck knows all about the history of sport; he is an encyclopedia of batting averages, handicaps, records and scores. He is in the midst of telling how someone took someone else in the seventh round. He mimes the knockout: "Pow! Pow! And, boy, he'd had it!" Rice listens, seated astride a bench. There is always an atmosphere of leisureliness in this place. A boy like Rice will take three or four hours to work out, and spend most of the time just yakking about show biz, about sport cars, about football and boxing--very seldom oddly enough, about sex. Perhaps this is partly out of consideration for the morals of the various young kids and early teen-agers who are usually around. When Rick talks to grownups, he is apt to be smart-alecky or actor-sincere; but with the kids he is as unaffected as a village idiot. He clowns for them and does magic tricks and tells them stories, deadpan, about a store in Long Beach (he gives its exact address) where once in great while, suddenly and without any previous announcement, they declare a Bargain Day. On such days every customer who spends more than a dollar gets Jag or a Porsche or an MG for free. (The rest of the time, the place is an ordinary antique shop.) When Rick is challenged to show the car he got, he takes the kids outside and points to a suitable one on the street.